"A Day in the Priorlife"

A while back, I decided to undertake a little writing experiment. I asked visitors to Evertime Realms to give me crazy sentences to start a short story. I picked my favorite, wrote a segment based on that, then asked for the next line. The result is the following four-part short piece, which ultimately was titled "A Day in the Priorlife." Hope you enjoy it.

The first line of this segment, the line in red type, was submitted by Andrea Speed, my reviews editor at Comixtreme.

1.

As I dug through the fifth vat of ducks in as many hours, I started to wonder if there was a better way to make a living. My job, you see, was to find the defective ones and remove them before they were sent to the Life. Unfortunately, the only way to tell if a duck is defective when he’s mashed in a vat with 20 other birds is that he is the only one who doesn’t try to bite you. I checked out each duck in vat number five one at a time, getting four bites in the process, and when it was over I stamped an “approved” sticker on it, hit the button and sent it down the assembly line.

It could have been worse, of course. I could have worked in donkey inspection or shark or – Boss Forbid – the mosquito inspection line. Most people would think shark inspection is the worst job on the assembly line, but mosquito was much worse. If a shark bites your arm off, they send you down to the Body Plant and snap a new one on. If you’ve got a thousand tiny mosquito bites, they hand you the calamine lotion and tell you to wait it out.

Humans, from what I understand, spend a lot of their time in the Life pondering the Afterlife. They spent very little time wondering about what we do, in the Priorlife (unless it’s to reduce everything to a petty political squabble), but without us, where do they think everything would come from? Someone has to make the ducks and the donkeys and the puppies and, yes, even the mosquitoes and the sharks. The smartest of us got jobs assembling humans themselves – the hardest job in Priorlife, and one even most of the people doing it never quite master. The dummies get the trees and the bushes and other plants – cushy jobs if there ever were one, with very few moving parts and only a few defense mechanisms to worry about.

I sat down to lunch with Doug from the platypus inspection unit. There was a running gag in the plant that the platypus was put together when a guy from the duck unit and a guy from the beaver unit got drunk one night and wound up at each other’s posts. It was always fun to needle Doug about it. “Afternoon, Doug,” I said. “Any new brainstorms lately? Did you staple an elephant trunk onto a ferret, maybe?”

“Laugh it up, George,” he said. “I hear they’re planning to experiment with duck teeth again pretty soon.”

“Bollocks.”

“Nope, it’s true. Some human has been dumping radioactive waste in the swamps. The Boss wanted a few mutations as a warning. Eddie over in cypress trees was talking to the manager about adding elbows.”

“Eddie? Didn’t he get busted down to cypress because he kept letting blind mice make it through the inspection line?"

“Just three of them.”

“Well I’m not going to just sit here and wait for them to start sending rabid poultry down the line,” I said. I put the rest of my lunch, uneaten, back in my lunchbox and slammed it shut.

“What are you doing?” Doug asked.

“I’m going to talk to the boss.”

Doug snorted. “Sh’yeah. Good luck.”

Thus ends part one. Send me the first line of part two at BlakePT@cox.net and then come back on Wednesday to see what I conjure up. Thanks for playing our game!

--Blake M. Petit, December 1, 2003

The first line of this one was submitted by my old buddy and frequent collaborator Scott Carter.

2.

They say she carried her own warmth around with her like a baby seal, which made it even more ironic that someone clubbed her to death for her fur coat. The Boss here in the factory was one of those many humans who, after dying, stuck around here instead of moving on to the Beyond. Most of them did it because they hadn’t accomplished the requisite amount of good in their lives but, at the same time, hadn’t lived a foul enough Life to be sent Below, so they were sentenced to work off their debt for us. The Catholics would have called it Purgatory. We called it Resource Management.

In the Boss’s case, though, I suspected her continued presence here was due more to the realization that if she did go Beyond she would no longer have any opportunities to make everyone’s lives miserable. She came across as the sweetest, most personable being you’d ever met, but you quickly learned this was a façade. She was a pencil-pusher, born, raised, Lived and died. And she was really, really good at it.

“Can we talk, Boss?” I asked, stepping into her office.

“Why of couuuuuuuuuurse, George!” she said. It was hopeless at that point already. Whenever she elongated a word to that degree, it was clear that she had no intention of giving you whatever you wanted. She had a sixth sense about that thing. If we had gum in the Priorlife, she would make it a point to deny me even a stick at this point.

“Well… you see… there’s this rumor going around about putting teeth on the ducks…”

“Oh, yes! Isn’t that a delightful idea?”

“Well--”

“It’s one of mine, you know.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“The corporate office wanted a few mutations in the marsh area. I considered for a while tampering with the trees or the shrubbery, or even the catfish, but then I thought to myself, ‘You know who’s the best person to inspect the new species? George!’”

I nodded through grinding teeth. This, out of all her tactics, was probably the most annoying. Whenever she was giving you the shaft, she found a way to craft it to make it sound like she was paying you some gargantuan compliment. There was a guy in frog inspection once who forgot to activate the tail-dropping mechanism as the tadpoles grew older. He got busted down to guppy inspection, but by the time he got there he was convinced that it was because nobody knew more about the gill system than he did.

“Look, I understand the need for a mutation once in a while, but have you ever been bitten by a duck?”

“Well, no, I can’t say that I have.”

“It’s like getting your arm clamped on by a couple of ridged plastic plates hard enough to leave welts. Now imagine that with sharp protrusions lining the bill.”

“Oh, George, you know that we wouldn’t be giving you an assignment like this if we didn’t have the utmost confidence in your ability to execute it.”

Execute. That word hung in the air, waiting to be plucked.

“Look, isn’t there something else we could do? Turn the ducks green? Give them an extra pair of wings? Oooh, I know, let’s put a kazoo effect on the quack. People love when we mess with the quacks. You know how a duck’s quack doesn’t echo? That was my idea…”

She slowly shook her head. “Oh George, those are all wonderful suggestions, but I’m afraid I’ve already requisitioned six million sets of duck teeth. Really, we must use them somewhere. Now don’t look so downtrodden. You know you’re the best man for the job.”

I nodded, nostrils flaring. “Okay, then,” I said. “Find yourself the second-best man. I quit.”

--Blake M. Petit, December 3, 2003

Today's kick-off line was submitted by Seth Jones, editor of the Pulp Legacy fanzine, of which I am a member.

3.

Say what you want to about the Priorlife, but the down-and-out hangouts -- the grungy bars and the seedy strip clubs -- are just as good, if not better, than they were in the Life. The interesting thing about it, of course, is that so many of the people you find there were humans, carrying over jobs they held in the Life that they believe kept them too unclean to move on to the Beyond. When they got here, however, they dwelled on those parts of their life and got pulled into it again, this time amplifying any natural talents or skills they had in that arena because… well… everything gets amplified here. So humans get trapped doing the very things that they think are keeping them here in the first place. It’s a nasty, vicious circle. On the upside, there’s not a bartender in the realm that ever gets an order wrong.

I was in my favorite hangout, St. Mike’s, downing beer after peer in a pretty futile effort. Even though stuff in the Priorlife looked and felt solid enough, the fact was there was no matter there at all, it was all a sort of free-floating energy coalesced into forms that made sense to the human spirits here. My body was energy. St. Mike’s was energy. The beer glass was energy and, sadly, the alcohol was energy, so I just kept drinking and drinking and not getting drunk. After a while, this process tended to get far more frustrating than whatever it was we were trying to drink to forget, but like so many things in the Priorlife, we kept doing it because that’s what the ex-humans tended to expect. It’s a lot of fun, when your existence is predicated on the expectations of beings that aren’t even supposed to be there.

“Why so glum, George?” Mike asked, sliding me my fifteenth Irish Ale of the evening.

“I quit,” I said. “I finally quit today, man.”

“You quit?” Mike said. “But I thought inspecting ducks was your life, man.”

“If inspecting ducks is anybody’s life, it’s time for him to trade it in and head back to Earth, man” I said.

“What was the breaking point?”

“Teeth. They wanted to start putting teeth on the ducks.” I rolled up my sleeve. “You see these welts, man? This is what I get with just beaks! Can you imagine if they had chompers, too?”

“I hear ya, pal!” shouted a guy down the counter. He was acting thoroughly soused. This was impossible, of course, but you still saw it from time to time, usually from a recent arrival from Earth who got psychosomatic inebriation.

“You know what I’m talking about, bud?” I asked.

“Heck, yeah!” he said. His eyes were bloodshot and a dribble of beer was spilling down over his red, stubbled chin. “My boss did the same thing to me down at the plant. I been puttin’ together cars for 32 years, then all of a sudden, they wanted to change the way it worked. Got all ‘automatic’. Wanted me to learn how to work all these machines.”

“So what’d you do?”

“Well, I walked right in there, jumped on the assembly line and waited for them to change their minds!”

“What happened then?”

He scratched his temple, slowly, like he was thinking. “I’m not sure,” he said. “The next thing I knew, I woke up here.”

I looked at Mike. I pushed the ale away.

“Goin’ talk to the Boss?”

“Yep.”

--Blake M. Petit, December 5, 2003

Our kickoff line for the last segment was submitted by my fellow Comixtreme columnist Brandon Schatz.

4.

Funny story about women: They still get angry when you ask them to kindly remove their butt cheek from your hand. When I went to talk to the Boss, I wasn’t sure if my plan involved groveling or pleading, but I was fairly certain it would be some careful formula of the two. The worst part was that she was probably sitting around waiting for me – I don’t know what I’d been thinking in the first place. Quitting a job with a dramatic flourish – it was such a human thing to do. In the Priorlife, our options were far more limited – each of us was suited for a specific number of tasks, and mine was animal inspection.

“Hey, Boss,” I said sheepishly as I stepped back into her office.

“George,” she said, smiling broadly. “How nice to see you again. Come to clean out your locker?”

“Um, not quite. Actually, I was thinking about what happened before, you see, and…” I sighed and put my hands down on her desk. “I was thinking maybe I spoke a little too soon.”

“Oh really?” she said, standing up, an unmistakable gleam of sadistic triumph in her eyes. “Do tell.”

“Well, I was just thinking about the line, really… who would you get to fill in my spot? I mean Doug isn’t ready, he still couldn’t tell a duck from a swan, and then we’d just have a repeat of that Hans Christian Anderson incident…”

“Mmm-hmm…” she said, walking around the desk. She was standing very close to me, leaning in, feigning interest in my pathetic speech. It was an intimidation tactic, of course. And of course, it worked.

“So I was figuring, if you’d just be willing to drop the tooth experiment after the first batch, I could get back on the line and get things going again.”

“Mmm-hmm…” she said again. Still smiling, she sat down on the edge of her desk. She was so intent on frustrating me, however, that she neglected to notice that she sat down squarely on my right hand. Suddenly I wanted nothing more than to get it away without alerting her to the fact that I was closer to her than anyone since her prom night.

“If, um… if that would be all right with you, boss,” I said.

She smiled. “Oh, well, George, that’s so generous of you,” she said. “Of course, you know we’d be happy to take you back. You’re one of the best we have.”

There was a “but” coming, I knew it.

“Buuuuuut…” she said, extending the word in a fashion only the most irritating among us are really capable of. “But I’m afraid we’ve already found someone to take your spot on the line. Now I’m sure you’d agree that it simply wouldn’t be right to deprive someone else of their hard-earned promotion just because you had a change of heart, wouldn’t you?”

“What are you saying?” I asked.

“Well, I was thinking we could find you a spot with something else… chickens, maybe, or crows. Or perhaps… George! Have you ever thought about snapping turtles?”

“Snapping what?” I shouted, standing up straight. Unfortunately, as I stood, my hands went with me, and as my hands pulled out the Boss felt, first, the sensation of my knuckles raking along her posterior, then the sensation of gravity yanking her from her desktop onto the ground because her balance was totally gone.

“Oh, geez, Boss are you all right?”

She glared up at me, hair askew, eyes dancing. “You know, George,” she said, “I do believe I’ve got the perfect spot for you.”

A week later I sat down in the lunchroom across from Doug again. He smiled.

“Georgie-boy!” he said. “You’re back!”

“I’m back.”

“Heard you got busted down to mosquitoes for feeling up the Boss.”

I’d been through the story enough times. I didn’t feel like correcting him.

“Something like that.”

“Something like that?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I groaned. I might as well tell him. The whole factory would be laughing about it pretty soon. I rolled up my sleeve to reveal the flesh of an arm that looked like ground hamburger.

“Mosquitoes with teeth,” I said.

Heck, wasn't that fun? Thanks to everyone who joined in the game -- and stick around, because you'll never know when I'll lose my mind and decide to try something like this again!

--Blake M. Petit, December 7, 2003